The Strange Career of Frank Dawson

Francis Warrington Dawson, my great-grandfather, was born in London in 1841. That wasn’t his original name, however: Christened Austin John Reeks, he was born into an educated, upper-middle-class Catholic family. After graduating from school, he took a European Grand Tour before university; then his father declared bankruptcy. An aunt, Mrs. Dawson, offered to pay his university tuitions, but died shortly thereafter. Instead, Austin took up writing as a career.

He also fell in love with the Civil War. At the time, many English saw the “War Between the States” as a highly romantic struggle. Young Austin saw a parallel between states’ rights and the English efforts to establish the Magna Carta. He became increasingly engaged, and in the fall of 1861, he announced his plan to join the Confederate forces. His father tried to stop him, declaring that Austin would get himself hanged and disgrace the family name. Austin replied by changing his name, so the only name to be disgraced would be his own. From then on he was known as Francis Warrington Dawson.

He volunteered for the Confederate Navy and in early 1862 sailed from England on the Nashville, under Capt. Robert Pegram. Shortly after his arrival in America, Dawson left the Navy to serve in the cavalry, under Pegram’s nephew, Capt. Willie C. Pegram. Dawson acquitted himself well, fighting at the Battle of Mechanicsburg, the Second Battle of Bull Run and, in 1863, at Gettysburg. He was wounded once and taken prisoner twice. He was later assigned to Gen. James Longstreet’s staff, and in 1864 he was promoted to captain. And yet at the end of the war, Dawson was rich in distinction, but nothing else: he wrote that he had a penknife and $5 to his name. But he didn’t consider returning to England; he had fallen in love with the South.

Instead, Dawson became a journalist, moving in 1866 to Charleston, S.C. He and a friend bought interests in two papers, which they merged. In 1868 Dawson became half-owner and sole editor in chief of the News and Courier. He also became an American citizen and began going by Frank Dawson. So began his new life.

For the next two decades Frank Dawson’s was a powerful voice in the New South. His editorials urged industrialization (“Bring Cotton Mills to Cotton”), scientific farming and racial tolerance. He was liberal, articulate and impassioned; his mission was to help the South embrace its future. He consistently presented racially tolerant views to a community that had never before heard them from a white man.

In 1874 Frank married my great-grandmother, Sarah Fowler Morgan, a judge’s daughter from Louisiana. She was a beauty, with wide blue eyes and long blond hair. She, too, was a romantic, an idealist, and a writer. (Her Civil War journal was later published as “A Confederate Girl’s Diary.”)

For a while, Dawson’s views, though iconoclastic, were broadly tolerated. But by 1876 Charleston was experiencing a racial backlash, with increased restrictions on African-Americans and enmity for their white supporters. Dawson carried on with his mission, believing in the power of the press and his own rational goals. He became a national political figure, and was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in 1880, 1884 and 1888.

Ben Tillman, a budding politician and anti-Reconstruction vigilante, vowed to bring Dawson down. A committed populist and racist, he accused Dawson of elitism, mounting vehement attacks on him through a rival paper. Soon public opinion began to change, and Dawson found himself fighting for his newspaper’s survival, and losing the support of the white community. During the 1888 election, in desperation, Dawson sided with the conservative white elite, and so lost the support of the black community as well.

The newspaper was on the edge of bankruptcy, but Dawson also had a domestic problem. Sarah had brought back an au pair from a European trip, a pretty French-Swiss woman named Hélène Burdayron. When a local doctor, Thomas McDow, called in to see a servant’s sick child, he became infatuated with Hélène. McDow began to stalk her, lurking in the garden and following her on the street. He asked Hélène to marry him, though he already had a wife, Katie, and a mistress, Julia Smith. The enigmatic Hélène did not accept his advances, but she did not repel them.

Dawson learned about this from an anonymous letter. Incensed, he went to the police. The police told him that McDow was even worse than he imagined: he was implicated in an insurance scandal, and was about to be charged with signing false death certificates. In fact, McDow’s life was seething with lunatic criminality: he had told his mistress, Julia Smith, that he planned to kill his wife, Katie, in order to marry Julia (who was one of Katie’s closest friends). He’d bribed his brother, Arthur McDow, to murder his father-in-law, Charles Ahrens, so that Katie would inherit his considerable wealth – a plot the police had uncovered before it was carried out.

The police urged Dawson not to take matters into his own hands, but Dawson had always taken matters into his own hands. On the afternoon of March 12, 1889, Dawson appeared at McDow’s door. McDow was upstairs having an argument with Katie; he came down and let Dawson in. Dawson introduced himself and then upbraided McDow for his improper conduct: Hélène Burdayron was under Dawson’s protection, and McDow was married. But McDow declared that Burdayron was an adult, and this was none of Dawson’s business.

They argued, and then McDow claimed that Dawson struck him with his walking stick. McDow opened a drawer, produced a revolver, and fired a single shot at Dawson. The bullet pierced the vena cava, the great vein bringing blood to the heart. “You have killed me,” Dawson exclaimed. He collapsed onto the floor. The great vessel emptied the blood from his heart, and he died within minutes.

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McDow dragged the body to an earthen-floored closet under the stairs, where he tried to bury it. Several hours later he dug it up and turned himself in to the police.

At the trial, McDow pleaded self-defense, and displayed his bruise. His lawyer suggested seductive entrapment by Hélène. The jury was not informed of McDow’s murder plot against Charles Ahrens, nor of his affair with Julia Smith, nor of his promises to murder Katie. Nor of a female patient’s complaint against McDow: On the day of the murder, McDow had paid a house call on a Mrs. Fair, whom he had “grossly insulted.” She pulled out her own gun to defend her honor and McDow turned to run from the room, striking his head against the doorframe. Mrs. Fair was not asked to testify. McDow was, in fact, presented as a victim: an outraged householder, a happily married man who’d been seduced by a foreigner and then attacked in his own home. He was acquitted.

According to family history, from then on my great-grandmother wore black. Whenever she saw McDow on the street, she raised her arm to shoulder-height and pointed at him. She was small but regal, and leveled a mute and somber accusation at her husband’s murderer, swiveling slowly, and tracking him as he passed. Whether it was because of her repeated public condemnation or other demons, McDow eventually committed suicide.

Absent Dawson’s resistance, Ben Tillman was easily elected governor in 1890, and he began an avalanche of racially oriented legislation, undoing the achievements made during the years of Reconstruction.

In our family we think of Dawson as a hero: impetuous, brave and idealistic. He was caught up from afar in something larger than himself, in the great thundering current running through this country. For a time he was in the center of it, making his own shifts and changes in the larger movement, fighting for what he thought right. Then his time ended, and he went down.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.